Google announced today (February 22, 2006) that it has hired Larry Brilliant, a smallpox fighting doctor, as the executive director for the Google.org non-profit organization. Brilliant is said to be a "tech-savvy doctor" that will team with the Google guys to give strategic direction to the Google philanthropic effort. According to Google's co-founder Sergey Brin:
"...we hope that the contributions of Google.org may someday exceed those of Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems."
I hope that the addition of Larry Brilliant can help add some ,extremely important, philanthropic experience to the organization since non-profits in general can sometimes be devalued by companies that misuse the non-profit classification to bolster the company image. With the little background information on Larry Brilliant that I have read throughout the media and blogosphere it seems to be a positive move towards its ambitious goals.
